Bouyei Batik Patterns in Correlation to the Oral Culture and

Socio-Historical Context of the Bouyei People: Taking the Sawtooth

Batik Pattern as an Example

Xiaoang Huang

Beijing International Bilingual Academy, Beijing, China

Keywords: Bouyei, Batik, Minority, Ethnicity, Pan Songs.

Abstract: The Bouyei ethnic group is a minority ethnic group residing in mostly Guizhou, China, with a unique oral

culture -where information is passed down through singing and visual art forms instead of writing-

exemplified through Pan songs. This paper will analyze the parallelism and correlation between the Bouyei

Batik dye, an art form significant to the Bouyei people, and the Bouyei pan songs. Specifically, how are the

Bouyei Pan songs and Batik dye correlated to each other: in terms of recurring motifs and symbolisms, mainly

analyzing the “Sawtooth” Batik pattern and Making Grains song, and the animalistic patterns and the Love

song, through a lens of formal elements in visual art and lyrical meaning.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Bouyei ethnic group, referred to as Jui or Yoi in

the Thai (Bouyei) dialect, is one of the 56 recognized

ethnic groups in China. Residing in mostly Guizhou,

China. They’ve developed their distinct culture of art

and expression, even including language diverging

from Chinese, with roots of Buddhism and other

Chinese folk religions, tackling their own way of

survival in a rather enclosed, mountainous terrain.

Despite Bouyei artifactual culture’s uniqueness and

complexity evident in multiple aspects, such as

embroidery, clothing, and folklores, one especially

significant and prevalent would be the Bouyei Batik

patterns.

With an inter-cultural relation with the Miao and

Yi ethnicity residing also in Guizhou, Batik dye,

using wax as a medium of barrier to dye fabric to

create patterns, is a form of natural-dye art prevalent

in rural areas of Guizhou. Due to the ethnicity’s

alienation from other majority ethnic groups in China,

the lack of written scripts prompted the Bouyei

people their distinct way of communication and

passing down of rituals, stories, and scripts through

Batik patterns and the motifs within these patterns,

with another major pathway of an oral education,

differing from the majority Han’s approach of

learning through scripted language. Batik patterns has

long been protected and cherished by the Bouyei

people, dating its origin back to the Song Dynasty, as

in recorded in Songshi, bees wax and Batik fabric is

an indigenous, unique product in Nanning State,

referring to Guizhou Huishui, the prolonged site of

Bouyei people today (Liu & Wei , 2018).

In this paper, Bouyei Batik patterns will be

analyzed under the lens of a sociocultural approach

with its correlation to the oral culture of Bouyei

culture; in terms of why Batik patterns are correlated

to the oral culture of the Bouyei ethnicity, and the

meaning it conveys grounded to a historical and

social context. Specifically, analyzing the shape

grammar, use of materials and color, as well as

allusions to folklores and recurring motifs of Bouyei

Batik patterns.

2 ANALYSIS OF THE ORIGINS

OF THE ORAL CULTURE OF

THE BOUYEI PEOPLE

The Bouyei ethnicity conveys ideas, folklores, and

information through a unique matter of fact because

of living in isolation for centuries due to its

mountainous surroundings. Debatably, the Bouyei

ethnicity’s origin correlates with Xihan Dynasty’s

“Yelang” empire due to it is similarities between

pronunciations of words, specifically, how they both

pronounced the vegetable bamboo shoot “ranz”,

which directly translates to “lang” — having a

Huang, X.

Bouyei Batik Patterns in Correlation to the Oral Culture and Socio- Historical Context of the Bouyei People: Taking the Sawtooth Batik Pattern as An Example.

DOI: 10.5220/0013996500004912

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Innovative Education and Social Development (IESD 2025), pages 393-397

ISBN: 978-989-758-779-5

393

repeating character in the name as the “Yelang”

Empire; Granted, the Bouyei Ethnicity becoming

more distinctive and alienated from the “Yelang”

Empire, where during the Wei, Jin, Southern and

Northern Dynasties to the Tang Dynasty, the Bouyei

and Zhuang ethnicity were called “vulgar liao”, after

five generations, the Bouyei people were being

distinctively called "Zhongjia”. Later, due to the

long-term separation, they gradually formed the

official Bouyei and Zhuang ethnic groups (Bouyei,

2024).

This complexed history of distinctiveness has

driven the Bouyei people to drift towards an oral

approach of learning. The Bouyei language, being a

member of the Tai-Kadai language family, is tonal

(Snyder, 2018), meaning that the tone or pitch of a

syllable affects its meaning, and has rarely forms of

written scripts; Differing from the tradition textbook

way of learning, such as standardized tests through

calligraphy in ancient China, the Bouyei ethnicity

does not own an official form of standardized written

script. However, there are modern efforts to

standardize the language and create a written form

based on the Latin alphabet(Bouyei Ethnic Minority,

2024), particularly in educational and governmental

contexts.

Therefore, knowledge is passed down through

oral approaches through sang folklores that includes

symbolisms and motifs representing indigenous

wisdom—through incorporating these symbols within

unique forms of art, replacing written scripts,

especially evident in fabric art and patterns interwoven

within Bouyei’s mundane life- the Batik dye.

3 THE PARALLELISM

BETWEEN THE BOUYEI "PAN

SONGS” AND BOUYEI BATIK

PATTERNS

Bouyei Pan songs exemplify the Bouyei oral culture

as it is the main method of the passing-down of

knowledge generation to generation. Pan songs

include numerous aspects, such as labor, government,

rituals, love, life, environment, history and legends. It

has two forms: indoor singing and outdoor singing.

Singing tunes are varied accordingly to love songs,

rituals, wedding songs, funeral songs and other

Bouyei songs involving academical fields such as

politics and economics (Yang, 2022). It vividly

describes the unique psychological characteristics

and emotional tendencies of the Bouyei people, it is

the oral “book” of the Bouyei people.

Figure 1: Bouyei Batik pattern, the “Sawtooth” pattern (Liu

& Wei, 2018).

One specific shape grammar is named the

“Sawtooth pattern (Fig 1),” or in other words, the

“dog teeth pattern”. Its name originates from its

shape: where continuous zig-zag lines and triangular

shapes merge with patches of negative space creating

shapes with round edges on the side and pointy shapes

at the bottom, resembling images of teeth and saw

teeth. This pattern symbolizes dog’s teeth as first

evident in a traditional Bouyei folklore, where a dog

sacrificed its own flesh to save a whole Bouyei village

in now Huishui, Guizhou from a sudden starvation

and disease crisis from a lack of harvest of crops and

unexplained viruses (Liu & Wei, 2018).

On the other hand, in the Bouyei Pan Song, the

Making Grains song, the lyrics sing (translated to

English, “Rich days are good planting fields and

cutting fields, small fields and large fields all needs to

be trimmed and cut…. (Yang, 2022)” saying how

people, on a “rich” and “lucky” day, would cut and

trim the paddy fields and harvest grains and rice using

a sharp tool. This song solely sings about the

complete process of making grains, including how to

sharpen bamboos to pilot the flowing water into the

paddy fields. The character “Cai”, meaning cut or

trim, is repeatedly used in this song, singing how

everywhere needs to be trimmed and cut, until all

paddy fields are harvested. This song documents all

the experiences needed for harvesting paddies,

praising sharp tools that have made their effortful

work more convenient and meaningful. Deducing

from the lyrics, this is how agricultural knowledge is

passed down to generations, in an oral way.. Drawing

a parallel to the “dog teeth (sawtooth)” pattern, dog

teeth not only symbolizes good omens and the

hardships, worth of respect in the survival of the

Bouyei people derived from it is heroic sacrificial role

in the folklore, it is a visualization of the tools used

for harvesting— It’s sharp edges and regular pattern,

spiritualizes the recurring motif of gratefulness

towards these tools for bringing people peace and life

in the village.

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Figure 2: Bouyei Batik Dye of Shitou Village, Huishui, Gui-

zhou. Batik dye on pure cotton fabric (Liu & Wei, 2018).

Furthermore, the dog teeth pattern is just a segment

of a complete Batik design on fabric (Fig 2), which

tells a rather complete story with multiple

symbolisms parallel to the spirituality conveyed in the

Bouyei pan song. In terms of color, it consists of

mainly teal and dark blue colors, which are

conventional colors in Bouyei people’s clothing and

art. In the Bouyei people’s perspective, teal and blue

are essentially the same color with the same

pronunciation of “heiou”. The utilization of the blue

and teal colors is inseparable from the Bouyei

people’s surroundings, where nature provides Bouyei

people with abundant resources of blue grass and East

green trees (Li & Gao, 2023). Using strictly pure

natural dyes, this symbolizes Bouyei’s spirituality of

respecting and worshiping the nature’s gift of tools

and protection; As the natural dye also performs a

protective function of preventing diseases, this draws

a parallel to the sang folklore of the song of harvest.

Figure 3: Composition diagram of the Batik dyed fabric in

Fig 2 (Liu & Wei, 2018).

Composition wise, the dog tooth pattern is a type

of geometrically shaped pattern out of multiple types

of shape grammar of Bouyei Batik patterns, where

simple, geometrical, and regular shapes are layered to

create complexed imagery. Since balance is a

common focus in Batik patterns, it is crucial to

maintain symmetrical forms of regular shapes even

through irregular substances of wax. In this piece of a

complete Batik design (Fig 2) where the dog tooth

pattern is present, the composition (Fig 3) of this

design mainly consists of circles and squares with

clear lines of symmetry, symbolizing, again, Bouyei

people’s respect to the laws existing within nature.

The composition also varies in density through the

placing of simple geometrical shapes established by

variations within negative and positive spaces.

Present in many designs of Batik, just like the dog

tooth pattern, most shape grammars are layered in a

horizontal way— Intertwining, layering, or leaving

out negative spaces. Not only to enhance the balance

within composition, this mimics the mapping of

paddy fields with a sense of movement through

creating a direction by grammatical shapes, passing

knowledge through recurring symbolisms present in

Harvest pan songs that passes a message of

agricultural wisdom.

4 DISCUSSION

Animals are always symbolisms of the sacredness,

the purity and the spirituality of nature, as seen

present in all occasions, including ceremonies and

rituals of funerals, for instance during funerals the

Bouyei people would organize a set up including

cedars and chicken, to create a spiritual environment

that allows a person’s soul to “leave in peace” along

with the blessings of nature during the whole pathway

towards afterlife (Wu, n.d.); Such as dog teeth as a

representation spirituality within harvesting.

In some batik designs, a rather realistic image of

animal and bugs are portrayed, distinctive from the

abstract patterns such as polka dots and the dog teeth

pattern. These patterns are considered recognizable

and obvious in its form and serves an emotion-wise

expressional function rather than illustrating folklores

like the dog teeth pattern does. One specific

combination of the utilization of animalistic motifs is

the combination of birds and butterflies/moths, and

carp fishes (Fig 4).

Bouyei Batik Patterns in Correlation to the Oral Culture and Socio- Historical Context of the Bouyei People: Taking the Sawtooth Batik

Pattern as An Example

395

Figure 4: Bouyei/Miao Batik pattern with the butterfly/

moth, bird, and fish (Dzulkifly, 2021).

In the Bouyei pan songs, birds and

butterflies/moths are always correlated to love due to

its prevalence in love songs, while the carp fish,

especially appearing in doubles, or quadruples, are

symbolisms of birth and the desire for

paternity/maternity. In the Bouyei pan song, Love

song 4, a girl is singing to her “lover boy” in a

feminine perspective, the girl sings “if you are far far

away, I will turn into a bee, call you standing on trees,

and I can change into all sorts of animals that can

fly… I will turn into a swallow, flying under your roof

to call your name.” The girl portrays herself as a little

bird or a little flying bee that would follow her

beloved one wherever he goes. The lyrics utilized a

repetitive structure, even with a sense of humor of

teasing him with intense love, turning into any being

that can fly so she could see him every day. These

animals and bugs mentioned are all living beings in

the Bouyei people’s mundane life, and due to the

extreme love and affection, they desire the ability to

fly and turn into any animals/bugs with a small size

and wings so they could follow their lover all the

time, just like a butterfly or a bird(Yang, 2022).

In this batik design (Fig 4), the composition is a

very significant component of deducing the message

of love outside of animalistic motifs. Although this

batik design having debatable origins from the Miao

and Bouyei (Dzulkifly, 2021), due to the female in the

center having Miao-similar silver wear while using

Bouyei batik styles of utilizing only white and blue,

the batik design has an undebatable message of love.

The girl standing in the center wearing traditional

Guizhou tribal feminine clothing and a female

headpiece, although in the center, is a less dominant

subject in the composition, with all fishes, bugs, and

birds having a larger area than her, flying near her or

beyond her. This represents an imagery of “dazzled in

love”, as portraying her whole thought and mind

sunken deep into this idealized thought of love and

marriage. Moreover, the symmetrical composition

reflects traditions within unity and spirituality within

nature, as well as an idealization of marriage and love.

This portrays an extremely similar image with the

metaphor of the willingness of turning into a “bee” or

“swallow” to chase after the singer’s lover, again,

conveying intense, dazzling emotions of love.

Therefore, this is another recurring motif as

organisms with wings are associated with love and

the pursuance of love in both the love song and batik

design including similar representations.

Moreover, the two carp fish in this batik design

has a more specific meaning rather than a generic

emotion of love. The carp fish is a specific type of

pattern that are gifted and drawn for newly married

couples. It is a symbol of fertility, the desire for more

children, good wishes for paternity and maternity for

passing down of bloodlines, which conveys their

admiration and respect for the primitive way of

breeding; These standards being considered as

idealized lifestyles in the Bouyei people’s tradition

culture is grounded to the Bouyei people’s

surroundings of an enclosed, mountainous area,

having a rather primitive and traditional value of

fertility, family, and birth compared to modern

values. Being one of the most prevalent patterns in

batik designs, carp fishes can be portrayed

realistically or abstractly through simple shapes, and

its prevalence could be explained by rivers and

streams surrounding the Bouyei people with abundant

carp fish due to its strong reproduction ability (Bai,

n.d.).

The meaning behind the carp fish pattern is

supported by fish symbolizing offspring and the “next

generation” in funeral songs. In the Sending Souls

Away song, to alleviate grief and the overall

melancholic atmosphere during funerals, like most

Pan songs, this song metaphorically portrays the

passing of their own parents as if “a fish leaves the

water” (Yang, 2022). Where the offsprings of the

passed parents convey their extreme grief through

portraying themselves as helpless fishes, which the

fish explicitly represents the “bloodline still being

passed on” by the presence of offsprings like

themselves, revealing the traditional fertility value of

the Bouyei people.

In this batik design utilizing carp fish as the main

subject (Fig. 5), the coral like pattern surrounding the

edged of this Batik dye mimics the shapes of waves

and splashing of water. This is a cohesive element

that grounds the elements of fish into their

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environment, also emphasizing the fact that fishes

always need water, just as how a children’s primitive

existence needs parents. This piece has a unique

composition where it creates a swirl-like pattern with

organic shapes. It is organized in a radial, circular

composition with the two fish at the center forming

the focal point with multiple visually leading lines.

The balanced and symmetrical arrangement radiates

outward in swirling patterns, creating a sense of

movement and harmony. The outer rectangular

border frames the entire composition, correlating to

the Chinese culture of “all is complete” within the

natural laws. The circular, swirling composition

provides visually leading lines that mimics the natural

swirl of water, while the circle symbolizes unity

within nature and the admiration of nature of Bouyei

people.

Moreover, the difference in density of the object

placement creates a harmonic and complex

composition, giving the main focal point a dominant

position, not only contrasting in size but also detail

and delicacy. The fishes gradually decrease in size as

all the small fish’s direction swims towards the

center, creating a visually dazzling composition that

symbolizes the complexity and desire for fertility.

The two fish in the center lays “head to toe”

mimicking the placement of a fetus, correlating to the

natural balance law of “Ying and Yang” enhancing

the visual focal point.

Figure 5: Carp fish pattern of Bouyei batik design

(Dzulkifly, 2021).

5 CONCLUSION

These are just some of the many examples of

symbolism present in complete Bouyei Batik

patterns, yet countless batik designs and Pan songs

remain undisclosed to the world due to

communication barriers and a lack of awareness for

such minorities like the Bouyei. The Batik patterns

grounds itself to the oral culture of Pan songs unique

to the minority Bouyei people, where the shape

grammar, composition, manipulation of natural

elements for colors, and most importantly, symbols

that are visualizations for oral information,

compliments each other to shape Bouyei’s identity

and voice. Where as simple as dog teeth and carp

fishes, could signify Bouyei people’s wisdom in

agriculture and values of love, representing spirits

and wisdom of often unwritten parallelism.

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Bouyei Batik Patterns in Correlation to the Oral Culture and Socio- Historical Context of the Bouyei People: Taking the Sawtooth Batik

Pattern as An Example

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